The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Beinart, whose research has featured prominently among South African social histories,
laid particular stress on rural processes in the shaping of South Africa. 2 This emphasis
was sustained in Twentieth Century South Africa through an insistence on seeing South
African history from the perspective of the countryside and with a deliberate emphasis
on rural processes. In the process, the awesome weight that South African
historiography has accorded the mineral ‘revolution’ and processes of social
transformation and class formation on the Witwatersrand was reduced in scale.
Far from being transformed overnight, Beinart was able to demonstrate that African
rural societies had been remarkably resilient in their capacities to survive, adapt and
resist change, thus holding on to important aspects of their society and culture. Africans
were constructed as independent social agents whose lives and activities could not only
be read as responses to the designs of their capitalist and colonial masters. Thus,
emphasis was placed on
the remnant identities and particularisms which have
been so powerful in shaping the ideas of the mass of the
people in the country ... the vitality of discrete rural
localities, the salience of ethnicity, the fragmented
patterns of urban social life, the multiplicity of religious
expression. 3
Through the absorption on new factors such as culture, ethnicity and gender into his
account, Beinart demonstrated the ability of social history to go further than earlier
versions of class analysis and enhance its explanatory capacities. In this more nuanced
perspective, the salience of rural struggles, the variety of cultural responses, economic
activities and social identities of African men and women, adult and youth in the city
were viewed in their richness, diversity and complexity. Africans were seen not as
passive victims of colonisation, oppression and segregation. Instead, they were involved
2 See especially, William Beinart, The Political Economy of Pondoland, 1860‐1930, Johannesburg: Ravan,
1982; William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular
Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape 1890‐1930, Johannesburg, Ravan, 1987; William Beinart,
‘Agrarian Historiography and Agrarian Reconstruction’, in John Lonsdale (ed), South Africa in
Question, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
3 William Beinart, Twentieth Century South Africa, pp 4‐5.
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